s
the usefulness and nobility of their profession, this thing
has not happened without some corresponding advance in the
intelligent thought and ready information of their patients
along the same lines.

We have come to think of ourselves as worthy of confidence
in the treatment of our ailments, and we believe if this was
accorded to us in greater measure it would be better for the
treatment and better for us. We do not claim that we should
be called in consultation in all our illnesses, but we would
be glad to have a little more explanation of the things done
to us.

FOOD AS A PRIME FACTOR OF CHARACTER.

What We Eat May Be More Important
Than Where We Live or Who
Our Parents Are.

Food makes the man; not heredity, not environment. Thus speaks John
Spargo, socialistic lecturer and author. The badly fed or underfed baby
quickly departs from the normal; imbecility, crime, pauperism all are
directly or indirectly due to the lack of food or its poor quality during
the plastic years.

Without accepting the doctrine that food is the sole factor in evolution,
some profit may be drawn from a more extended statement of Mr. Spargo's
views given in the New York _World_:

The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in
such large numbers in our public schools represent poor
material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty,
and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children
for whom we have found it necessary to make special
provision--the dull pupils found year after year in the same
grades with much younger children.

In a measure the relation of a child's educability to its
physical health and comfort has been recognized by the
corelation of physical and mental exercises in most
up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic
significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is
quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding
influences upon the physical training as upon mental
education.

There are certain conditions precedent to successful
education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a
reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy
home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must
necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the
child. It denies its victim these very necessaries with the